She took a job working for an old school showbiz publicist who would later become famous for having himself surgically attached to Elton John, or at least for bouncing around Elton’s famous Troubadour debut shouting, “Far out” into the face of every journalist on the premises. My dear friend and mentor Lewis S— got a job working for the guy, and I had an excuse to drop by and marvel at Big Patti. The first time I did so, Hot pants had just become fashionable, and I am able to promise you that no one on earth was wearing better than she was wearing her purple ones, with purple boots. OMG. I became Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners(, incapable of intelligible speech. Homina homina homina!
The day after the record company I was working dispatched me to NYC to make Procol Harum feel loved on their behalf, Lewis S— related that Patti had lost her shared house in Laurel Canyon, and was driving back and forth every evening to Mama’s place in very distant Buena Park. I graciously (you bet!) asked him to ask Patti if she might like to stay at my apartment just down the hill from Chateau Marmont (around 200 yards from Old School Publicist’s office) in my absence. She would.
She picked me up at LAX on my return home, in different hot pants. Humina humina humina. By the time we ‘d reached West Hollywood, I had regained my power of speech and was able to suggest she stay the night rather than drive all the way to Orange County. She agreed. I felt as though dreaming. We made love, during which I thought to myself, “No one will ever be able to take this away from me.” I’d won the lottery.
I’d won a dozen lotteries. At last, I was demonstrably someone to be reckoned with— one at whom the world looked and thought, “Well, he must have something major going for him.”
For one who grows up loathing himself as fervently as I did, such ecstasy is short-lived. It was remarkable how quickly I first began taking Patti’s love— she was the one who said, “I love you,” first — for granted, and then, I’ve come to realise in the intervening decades, actually coming to disdain her. Must there not have been something…missing in anyone who’d want to be my life partner? Could she not see who I was? What was wrong with her?
Having been raised in a joyless household — Mama loathed Papa with all her might I couldn’t reasonably have been expected to be happy being happy. I was surly and brutish and selfish and demanding with this remarkable woman, whose kindness and patience and generosity were a match for her outward beauty. I cheated on her with groupies not fit to fold her laundry, and lied to her about doing so.
But you ain’t seen nothing yet. When, after three and a half years, she’d had enough and informed me that she wasn’t in love with me anymore, I actually managed to feel wronged. How could she!
For about six months, I could barely catch my breath, as I couldn’t imagine getting through the next 10 minutes. In my agony, I irrevocably fumbled a major career opportunity. Every day I felt as though pulling myself across a parking lot covered with broken glass to endure the pain of my life until four o’clock, when I could self-medicate with Cutty Sark.
Lewis S— got me through it, he and Mama, who, in her finest hour, seemed to revel in being my most reliable source of reassurance. And then, after five months, Patti phoned. She wanted to come over.
The sun came out. I was still beside myself, but now with elation. I tidied up my apartment, full of the hideous furniture we’d had to grab when the showroom owner whose place from whom Patti had ordered some much nicer stuff lost everything in Las Vegas. I blowdried my hair with especial care. I put on the tight patchwork jeans she’d told me she thought I looked sexy in. (“My beautiful man,” she’d marveled, nearly making me faint!) Whatever happened, I would be calm and charming, unrecognisable from the emotionally 14 asshole she’d ceased to be in love with.
It didn’t work. Having apparently verified that she could no longer love me as she had, she made up an excuse to leave after maybe 20 minutes. And now, my own finest hour, as I somehow didn’t lose my temper, and in fact remained my most charming as I walked her to the elevator.
As the doors of which closed, she was three times as gorgeous as the night she glowed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, more beautiful than any woman I’d ever laid eyes on. And done with me. I’m not sure how I lived through it.
She managed the publicity for Monty Python’s Hollywood Bowl show, and then disappeared. But then, 10 years ago, someone who’d known her from the record biz somehow secured her email address. She’d married a guy with whom she operates a sport fishing business in Marina del Rey. She informed a mutual acquaintance that she had desire to hear from me. I wrote her a letter — by hand, to demonstrate my sincerity — assuring her I hadn’t the slightest intention of trying to disrupt her marriage and wanted only to be a good and loyal friend to her in our last years to make up for the person I’d been when we were as one.
No reply.
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